Sometimes it takes a good few books to warm to a cop. I didn't bond with Ian Rankin's John Rebus (all those SAS hang-ups, eclectic pop music and disgusting takeaways), until the villainous "Big Ger" Cafferty came on the scene, after which I couldn't get enough of either of them. Same with Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander and Reginald Hill's Andy Dalziel, who changed my views of depressive and fat men. And then there are cops with whom it's love at first sight - Donna Leon's Commissario Brunetti, for instance, sensitive, sophisticated, romantic, but then he's Venetian and pretty much the polar opposite of my latest policeman pin-up, Joe Cashin. I cannot believe I have fallen for an Aussie cop - aren't they even lower, brasher and tougher than the ones in Miami Vice and the NYPD? Cashin is tough, but he's sensitive too. He listens to Puccini and knows instinctively if people are decent, or rotten, or lying. Set in small town Victoria, this is a dark, complicated, thoroughly satisfying murder mystery about corruption, abuse and retribution. Temple's prose, stark and staccato, mirrors the violence and Rupert Degas's maintains the tension until the final moments.

Another small town murder mystery, this time in Canada, to which Penny's thoroughly civilised French-Canadian gumshoe Armand Gamache from the Montreal Sûreté is dispatched. Three Pines is a sleepy community where the event of the year is the local art exhibition. In the hunting season the maple woods are full of rifle and how-and-when the body of a little old lady is discovered under a tree with an arrow wound it looks like an accident; it isn't, of course. There's more, much more going on in Three Pines than meets the eye, as Penny cleverly reveals in an old-fashioned whodunit which keeps you guessing until the very last. The local artists are a weird and potentially murderous bunch of geeks, and as climaxes go this one in a snake-ridden cellar takes some beating.

An elegant and entertaining collection by eight classic crime writers - the third in this series , it includes Conan Doyle's famous story The Speckled Band. I must have read it half a dozen times, but it still sends shivers up my spine maybe because I am terrified of - no, I had better not spoil if for you. Listening to these I now realise where the inventors of Cluedo got their idea from - it's full of colonels and libraries, chaps going fishing and people saying things like "My God, Carruthers, are you serious?" Murders were so much more inventive in the old days.